We're very happy to announce that we'll be officially collaborating with Chattanooga Public Library facilitating collaboration between WTCI Public Television, Public Education Foundation, Hunter Museum of American Art and Chattanooga Pechakucha to pilot Hyperlocal Hyperaudio. We're very grateful to the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund for helping us on our way!
Mozilla Gigabit is all about taking advantage of the roll out of gigabit networks around the US. These new high speed internet connections offer us a great opportunity to try out new high bandwidth technologies like Hyperaud.io.
One of our aims is to get Hyperaudio into libraries and schools so that we can trial it with the younger generations. We'd love to introduce video essays into the classroom as a format that can teach students new ways of analyzing and using media to express their points of view. Hyperaudio's transcripts allow people to quickly navigate and locate content, we hope this will facilitate a deeper appreciation of the studied material as well as better media literacy.
Notably, I found that as I mined the text and the footage for moments to best express the story I wanted to tell in my own creation, I developed a much more intimate understanding of the content itself. I had unknowingly been engaged in an active learning process. When I edited and remixed the content to make my own creation, I was learning by doing; I was engaged in a personal, creative, learning process that allowed me to experience the content relative to my own needs.
Nate Hill - Hyperlocal Hyperaudio
So what are we going to do? Well, we are planning to transcribe local material and create a local version of hyperaud.io that can be used to remix, embed and so expose new content. We hope to trial with groups of all ages (in and out of the classroom) gather some much needed feedback and all of this will allow us to improve the core product, which remember is open source and available for anybody to use.
We recognise that working closely with end users is invaluable and we're going to make the most of it!
On a related note we're also happy to announce that we are through to the semi-finals of the Knight News Challenge - the theme this year is 'How can we strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation?' and we feel that Hyperaudio is a particularly good fit for this year's brief. Certainly Hyperaudio is all about encouraging free expression and by setting up as a non-profit and releasing all our code under an open source license we are encouraging innovation.
From our application:
We're breaking media on the web down into its distributed component parts, thus allowing it to be reconstructed in new forms with source intact, promoting and enabling free expression and innovation through the power of the remix.
We will focus on the educational application of the Hyperaudio Ecosystem. The idea being that if we can develop something that young people find appealing then we have the start of something that can appeal to to all age groups.
Wish us luck!